


Always Keep Fighting

by SaltAndBurn (AlyssiaInWonderland)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Addiction, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Always Keep Fighting, Angst, Don’t copy to another site, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Hurt Sam Winchester, Introspection, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, POV Sam Winchester, Protective Dean Winchester, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-10
Updated: 2019-01-10
Packaged: 2019-10-07 18:23:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17371013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlyssiaInWonderland/pseuds/SaltAndBurn
Summary: Sam tries to remember a time when he felt whole, innocent.He knows logically that once upon a time, he was. Hell, Dean half-killed himself to keep him that way; still does if he can get away with it. His big brother hardly ever knows when it’s time for him to step down and let Sam be grown.He gets that, he does, even if it’s frustrating beyond measure that his brother still feels responsible for his welfare. It’s not like Sam has much innocence left to preserve.Sam can’t remember the last time he saw blood and felt pure, uncomplicated pain and fear.





	Always Keep Fighting

**Author's Note:**

> Though it may be obvious from the tags, tw for self-harm, alcoholism, overall references to addiction, and veiled portrayal of depression and dissociation. Look after yourselves, my darlings, and don't read this if you think it's going to trigger you! <3

Sam tries to remember a time when he felt whole, innocent.

He knows logically that once upon a time, he was. Hell, Dean half-killed himself to keep him that way; still does if he can get away with it. His big brother hardly ever knows when it’s time for him to step down and let Sam be grown.

He gets that, he does, even if it’s frustrating beyond measure that his brother still feels responsible for his welfare. It’s not like Sam has much innocence left to preserve.

Sam can’t remember the last time he saw blood and felt pure, uncomplicated pain and fear.

It started earlier - way back before he was addicted to demon blood, before he knew why Dean made him stay inside salt circles and carried a gun and a silver knife like an amulet.

Sam had been so young when he’d first done it. He wasn’t sure why. It was this tumbling chaos of everything he hadn’t been equipped to handle. It was Dean sometimes going out with their father and coming back injured and contrite. It was their father slurring orders with enough whiskey in him that Sam worried he’d set himself ablaze if he lit up a smoke. It was him, trying desperately to seize some modicum of control over his life and his pain, because nothing he had was ever truly his. Not in their life.

He hadn’t really thought it through, that first time. He’d sneaked a penknife and locked himself in the bathroom when Dean and John had been out hunting. The rush of holding the blade to hi skin had almost been enough for him to pass out. It was heady and spiced with fear and excitement, and it felt so good compared to the sickening numbness of the rest of him that he closed his eyes to feel it harder. 

Carefully, he pressed deeper into his thigh until the blade caught, and he dragged the blade across. The slight tug on the blade from his skin felt strange, a dimension to the stripe of pain that magnified the confusion already swimming through his brain.

He gripped his thigh, the blade flat against it, breathing deeply and blinking away a few tears that had emerged involuntarily. When the sensations, the way it snagged his mind and sucked him into a pleasurably absent state, receded, he opened his eyes and looked down at his thigh.

The blood was starkly red in the harsh lighting of the motel bathroom. It smeared across the blade and clung to his skin as it trickled down to bead and then drip to the floor. He had to close his eyes again, because the way it looked made him feel dizzy.

When he took a second peek, the feelings punched him in the gut, returning with a vengeance, and he felt his mind slipping away again, as he let the knife clatter to the floor. His fingers played with the blood on him, though the flow had already almost stopped. The redness was hypnotic. His body was filled with a cocktail of adrenaline and pain and endorphins that made him give a strange, strangled, but elated giggle.

The pain throbbed through him, and he scrunched his face up, a tiny whimper replacing his hysteria. Something about the hurting felt unnaturally good. The rightness of it was horrifying. The way the rest of his life was. 

A physical manifestation of the idea that something was wrong.

Finally.

Some piece of evidence he could look at, point to, to have a reason for everything that was so nebulous and undefined to him.

Sam knows now that this was just the first step. The first sign that his innocence was gone, or maybe hadn’t really been there in the first place, if he’s feeling particularly dark that day.

After that day, he’d had to make up some story about trying to cut some string, and he’d been so authentically terrified that Dad or Dean would be mad at him that they didn’t press.

He views cutting in that way, the deliberateness to the after-effects, as a luxury. He’s always been a decent liar, but it’s much harder to excuse a cut that looks clean and deliberate than it is other things.

Bruises. The wrong dose of meds. Scratches. Scrapes, torn lips, busted knuckles. It’s right there in the bones of the life they lead, and he usually takes his opportunities, because it’s damn hard to hide anything on his body when they share quarters so closely. Another decision about his body taken from him, even if it’s only that he can’t cut like he thinks is sensible. He could cut his hips, but he doesn't. It feels like the wrong place; he can’t look at it there, really, and it’s inconvenient, and he hates how it makes him have to remember his body. Cutting legs feels the right level of detached. So does taking his chances whenever he can to get an extra hit.

He learned to see it that way fast, and he’s not been able to correct himself.

Since then, he’d been almost-caught so many times. Once, his father had given him an awkward talk about how he needed to watch his own back more. Dean managed the best; Dean would look at Sam’s injuries and gently patched them up if they needed it, and looked at him with genuine love and worry. It was almost enough to make him quit. He tried so many times. But even back then, he’d been an addict.

It ran in the family, clearly. Not the hurting, exactly, not in that specific way. If it did, he didn’t know. But their father was on a single-minded mission to hunt down every creature he could before he drowned in alcohol, and Dean was drinking his way through every liquor store on the road when he wasn’t fucking his way through the hotter, available people he came across or hustling pool. Addiction was practically a family bonding experience.

So no, he doesn’t remember a time when he felt truly innocent. And the way Dean insists on coddling him, like he’s a child under his protection, chafes.

He’s never had it in ways he can recall, and he’s pissed off by attempts to preserve what he’s lacked since forever.

He still misses it.

It’s one of the myriad of reasons he doesn’t actually punch Dean in his overly-concerned face.

He wants it; he craves being the person Dean sees in him.

He wishes he’s innocent, that he needs Dean to keep him from facing the darkness. He hates that he never got to have that; that neither of them did. He’s been so old since he was so very young, and when he lets himself consider it, he knows Dean is the same way, just different.

Dean gets some memories of innocence, of their mom, that he projects onto Sam because he’s always tried to give Sam whatever he remembers of their happier, mom-and-love-filled life.

Sam isn’t sure if the taste of jealousy is better or worse than the taste of what might have been that Dean gets.

In the end, it doesn’t matter which piece adds up to worse. It sucks for the both of them, end of.

He’s not going to cry for the children they should have got to be, because as much as he teases Dean for being repressed, sometimes, when it’s the important stuff, he can’t shed a single tear either, no matter how much he wants to.

So no. He’s not going to cry about it. He’s not going to share a beer and his scars and his secret darkness. He’s not going to dredge up their past just because it still brands their present. He’s long since buried the childhood they might have had, if his blood wasn’t mingled with that of a demon.

But he will mourn it.

Quietly and without mark.

And then he’ll roll his eyes, and let Dean speak his piece about protection and danger, and he’ll listen calmly and then steadily fight back until they’re right where they started.

Trapped in the dark together, scrambling for a way out.

They have a better chance that way, a better shot at one day finding some kind of absolution.

And if along the way they can keep even one more person safe and untarnished?

It’s worth every second.

* * *

 

Always Keep Fighting

**Author's Note:**

> So I'm not really sure what this is. I just kind of wrote it out because it happened all at once in my head. It's sort of a random piece of introspective Stuff.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed it. <3
> 
> As ever, comments and kudos feed my dark soul and buy my eternal gratitude!!!


End file.
